Lies About Cold Calling
Effective tactics in sales cold outreach.
I found this on LinkedIn the other day:
To be fair, I’m sure that there is value in the material. It’s not a knock on ZoomInfo, they’re just promoting their webinar.
What caught my eye was the end of the title, “without cold calling”.
It’s catchy copywriting. The truth is much less catchy ...
There is No Magic Bullet
Cold calling is just another tool in the toolbox:
Cold calling
Emailing
Multithreading
Omni channel
Social Selling
There’s alway a hot new trend. This is followed by advice around how you don’t need one of those tools (ie cold calling) to get the job done.
The Only Thing That Works
Thinking critically about how you can drive curiosity around a pain which you did research for to prompt engagement. Then use everything in the toolbox to test, iterate, and optimize. It’s simple, boring, but hard.
I like this take:
Credit: WillAllred
There’s two reasons it stands out:
Being a good writer is being a good communicator.
Thinking through something is the hard work.
Throwing the words into the software, be it chatGPT, or (insert any sales automation tool here) doesn’t take much thinking. However, it’s safe to say you should be leveraging a tech stack and AI to be more efficient.
Credit: BowTiedSystems
Today’s macro economic environment is one where budgets are heavily scrutinized and every single buyer has hundreds of vendor emails going into their inbox. It’s safe to say that automating the critical thinking of the content being delivered or using one tool when you have multiple at your disposal is the answer.
Credit: Sapphire Ventures 2023 SaaS Buyers Outlook
With that, here are some ideas on how to potentially stand out.
How to Stand out
I’ve compiled a short list of ideas that could add value into how you approach potential accounts. Broadly speaking, you’ll find two buckets we’ll walk through today:
Research
10k sections 1 & 7 (will break down how to do this next week)
Recent Press
LI Map + Zoom Info Org
If the company is private, see if you can find annual reports. Dig deep into recent press, executive interviews, or leverage competitor info and your prospect company’s website to draw some baseline conclusions.
Use Gong.io, Chorus.ai, or other sales intelligence software if you have it at your disposal. If you need a more cost efficient solution, check otter.ai. Use transcripts of customer interviews, initial, or past discovery calls. Then and use prospect language and plug that into the campaign when you’re reaching out. Ie if they refer to a business unit with an acronym, use the acronym.
You can take this same approach for prospecting, elevating the conversation within a deal cycle, or even interviewing for a new role.
Goal of Outreach
Don’t make the goal of initial outreach to obtain a meeting. That sounds counterintuitive but the best thing to do is just drive curiosity.
B2C companies are typically ahead of the curve when it comes to communicating and reaching their audience. If you study the best B2C copywriters you find their goal is simple. Get the reader to the next sentence. Do the same in your outreach.
Say Less. Speak Simple.
Use multiple tactics to THEN ask for a meeting. Driving curiosity, value, and familiarity … across email, social, AND phone.
It’s Boring
It’s easy to chase a shiny tactic.
If only there was one email template that would drive more responses.
If only there was one channel to drive more meetings.
If only there was that one question that would close more deals.
The thing is … it’s hard to think critically about applying a principle.
As always, thank you for reading and see you next week.
-Andrew Kobylarz